Burnout rarely begins on one specific day, with one big, obvious event. More often, it builds over years, through the same patterns repeating day after day: the pressure keeps growing, there’s no real recovery, and an ordinary day can no longer hold everything people keep trying to fit into it.
Many women know this all too well: after paid work, the second shift begins at home. Responsibilities, chores, and daily logistics pile up until it starts to feel like even 24 hours in a day isn’t enough.
At first, it just feels like being tired. Then irritation and a sense of being trapped start showing up sooner than usual. Then, in an effort to save energy and time for “what actually matters”, even the things that used to bring joy simply by being there gradually disappear from view. And then Sunday is over, Monday morning has arrived – and you feel even more drained than before.
When people start looking for ways to deal with burnout, the advice usually makes perfect sense: rest, get more sleep, reduce the load, reclaim some free time, learn to stop. The problem is that all of this takes energy – and energy is exactly what you don’t have when you’re burned out. And often there’s no one else to take over those daily responsibilities, which is precisely how they became so overwhelming in the first place.
In real life, a worn-out woman who comes home from work and often has to be, on top of everything else, a mother, household manager, cleaner, personal chef, and tutor does not always have the capacity even to think about rest – or about what might bring her joy at all.
In the first season of the podcast Made BY People, we tell the story of a project that began as a tool for dealing with burnout, but eventually grew into something much bigger.
We don’t want to spoil the simple but effective thing that Alyona, a methodologist and the creator of LES, discovered along the way. Instead, we recommend stepping into the atmosphere of the episode and hearing about it from Alyona herself. In the podcast, she talks about how LES works – the project she created while trying to get through her own burnout. She also explains how this approach differs from the kind of advice that tells you to completely overhaul your life. Because that is not how life works: more often, you have to work with what is already there, rather than magically remove everything that has piled up.
To understand why LES is set up differently, it helps to first look at how burnout is usually explained.
Most writing about burnout follows a familiar pattern: what burnout is, its symptoms and stages, self-tests, prevention, and what to do next. And that structure has its value. It helps people name what they are going through and stop writing everything off as laziness or weakness.
Studies of burnout often point to a whole cluster of signs: constant fatigue, apathy, irritability, sleep problems, and the feeling that ordinary tasks have become harder than they used to be.
But burnout is not just tiredness. You can be tired after a difficult project, a move, a season of deadlines, or a week without enough sleep. With burnout, the day itself starts to feel different. What used to be just a task starts to feel like one more thing to carry. What used to bring joy becomes something you “don’t have time for”. What you want is no longer simply to rest, but to switch off from everything that is happening.
Advice about rest, sleep, and reducing the pressure really can help – especially when someone recognises it early and the pressure is temporary. But when the problem is not just the number of hours, but the way life or work is arranged, rest alone is often not enough.
Materials that explain what burnout is have their limits too. They help people name what is happening and recognise themselves in the symptoms. But when someone is already tired of analysing themselves, one more article explaining what is going on can start to feel like one more demand. Now I know more terms – but in the morning, life still begins with the same tasks. Knowing the right terminology is rarely enough to help someone actually get through burnout. And constantly reading and talking about it can sometimes keep the focus fixed on the state itself, almost “summoning” it. It certainly does not make things feel any easier.
LES stands here for the Laboratory of Everyday Significance.
[Editor’s note: The project’s original acronym transliterates as LES. In Belarusian, the same word also means “forest”, which is why the project’s language often draws on forest imagery.]
And in LES, you do not have to cope. It is a space where whatever is possible right now is enough. Where exercises can be done your own way, partly, or not at all. Where you can come for the feeling that a lot is already okay with you – not for yet another list of things to fix.
The way it works is very simple: small exercises that can be folded into an ordinary day, and a space where participants share what worked for them. You do not need to travel somewhere beautiful, set aside half a day, or become the kind of person who now “recovers properly”. What matters more is this: trying to look more closely at the life you already have – and not doing it alone.
Women of different ages find their way to LES along different paths. Many of them have had to become exceptionally good at managing life: work, home, children, moves, paperwork, deadlines, other people’s emotional states. But the price of that skill can be far too high.
LES may be worth joining if you are tired of living in “I just have to cope” mode, but do not want another intensive, marathon, or challenge. If you want less mental churn and less going round in circles. If you want to look at your life from a different angle, and you value being in a group where you can support others and also warm yourself a little by the shared fire. Day-to-day communication happens on Telegram. The two required live online meetings, at the beginning and end of the project, will take place on Google Meet or Zoom.
Alyona says that any woman can join a LES group, but there is a brief getting-to-know-you step first. Not a soulless “tell us about yourself” prompt, which can genuinely make you freeze, but more focused questions: about how you are doing, your interests, what you are looking for, and how you imagine the project.
It is a bit like a small gate before a clearing. And it matters mainly as a way to understand who is coming, what they are coming with, and how to make the group feel calm enough. In that sense, filling out the form is a way of setting up the space in advance.
If you have already listened to our podcast episode and would like to come to LES, please fill out Alyona’s form here: https://forms.gle/3BJV5Y2sgVSL68PB9
This will help her get to know you a little and get in touch to explain how and when you can join the next LES group.
You do not need to fill out the form trying to come across as the “right” kind of person. You do not need to come with a perfectly formed request. Whatever is there for you right now is enough: tiredness, interest, curiosity, a wish to try it, or even the doubt that “maybe this isn’t for me at all”. You can come with that too – even just to look around.